Excerpt

Summer Love

In an exclusive excerpt from her new novel, American Wife, inspired by the life of Laura Bush, Curtis Sittenfeld offers a glimpse into a Waspy enclave and its reigning family, the Blackwells. Our heroine, Alice Lindgren, has just become engaged to Charlie Blackwell, and the happy couple is driving up to Charlie’s summer place for a weekend of cocktails, tennis round-robins, and family intrigue.

I had bought a basil plant in a small terra-cotta pot to give as a hostess present to Charlie’s mother, but we were less than halfway to Halcyon when I began to question my selection. This second-guessing occurred right around the time I came to understand that Halcyon, Wisconsin, was not, as I had previously assumed based on Charlie’s passing references, a town. Rather, Halcyon was a row of houses along a 700-acre eastern stretch of the peninsula that was Door County, and in order to own a house, you had to belong to the Halcyon Club. Apparently, you became a member by being born into one of five families: the Niedleffs, the Higginsons, the deWolfes, the Thayers, and the Blackwells. Charlie’s first kiss, he explained cheerfully, had been with Christy Niedleff, when he was 12 and she was 14; Sarah Thayer, the matriarch of the Thayer family, was the sister of Hugh deWolfe, the patriarch of the deWolfes; Hugh deWolfe and Harold Blackwell, Charlie’s father, had been roommates at Princeton; Emily Higginson was the godmother of Charlie’s brother Ed; and those were about all the intramural details I managed to retain, though there were many, many more, and Charlie shared them with increasing zest the closer we got to our destination. The families had purchased the land together in 1943, he said; they each had their own house, their own dock, and everyone took their meals at a jointly owned and maintained club. Oh, and the Halcyon Open would occur that weekend, the long-standing tennis competition for which a silver trophy vase sat on the mantel in the clubhouse and on whose surface the men’s singles and doubles champions’ names were engraved each year: Charlie had won singles in 1965, 1966, and 1974, and he and his brother Arthur had won doubles in 1969.

“You eat all your meals at a clubhouse?” I said. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”

“The peanut-butter no-bake bars are out of this world,” Charlie said. “And the apple pie, it makes you proud to be an American.”

“But who cooks? Do you take turns?”

“No, no, there’s a staff.” His voice was casual—of course there was a staff—and I tried to absorb this information quickly and invisibly. Just as I did not think I ought to apologize for having been raised middle-class, I did not think Charlie ought to apologize for, or feel self-conscious about, his privilege.

“Maybe we shouldn’t mention our engagement to your family this weekend,” I said. “Is that all right? We could invite your parents and my mother and grandmother to lunch in Madison and tell them all together.”

Charlie turned toward me, grinning. “Having second thoughts?”

“It feels more respectful not to tell either family first,” I said. “Plus, it might be too much to say to your parents, ‘This is Alice, and by the way, she’s my fiancée.’ ”

“You’re not worried they won’t like you, are you?”

Not entirely honestly, I said, “No.” We were passing tall, skinny white birch trees, and along with my anxiety about the impending introductions, I had started to feel that restlessness that arises when you know you’re approaching water but it hasn’t yet come into view. At last, I saw Lake Michigan through the trees, still distant but blue and sparkly in the sun. Charlie pulled off the road and drove onto a stretch of lushly green grass dotted with sugar maples, evergreens, and irregularly spaced white shingled buildings of various sizes; I took the largest one to be the clubhouse.

“Halcyon, sweet Halcyon,” he said, and he began honking the horn in rapid spurts. He pointed to the big building. “That’s the Alamo, which is where Maj and Dad and some of the grandkids sleep.” Maj, I already knew, was Charlie and his brothers’ nickname for their mother, short for Her Majesty—and he claimed she liked it. “They might put you in there, but it’s likelier you’ll be in one of those.” He was pointing at the smaller cottages. “That’s Catfish, and Gin Rummy, and Old Nassau. And you see that one?” He grinned. “Smoked my first joint there, and nearly burned the place to the ground. It’s called Itty-Bitty.” He stuck his head out the window, and I saw that someone had emerged from the biggest house and was approaching us, someone who strongly resembled Charlie except with darker hair.

Charlie parked next to a wood-paneled station wagon—there were five cars pulled up near the back of the house—and the other man approached my door, rested his forearms on the roof while peering down at me through my open window, and smiled. “So you’re the reason none of us have heard from Chasbo in weeks,” he said. “Now I see why.”

“Back off, perv,” Charlie said, and there was a happiness in his tone I had not heard before, not quite like this. “Alice, meet my brother Arthur.”

We shook hands through the window. “I admire you,” Arthur said. “Not every woman is willing to go out with a retard.”

Charlie was out of the car by then, and before I really knew what had happened, he’d tackled Arthur from the side and they were rolling over and over in the grass, tussling and laughing. I opened the car door and stepped out. The smell, that sweet, clean smell of northern Wisconsin—it almost made Halcyon seem worthy of its pretentious name. I looked around at the five buildings. I was pretty sure by now, though Charlie had not explicitly said so, that these structures represented only the Blackwells’ property, their compound, and not the entirety of Halcyon as I’d thought when the houses had first come into view.

As soon as we stepped inside the Alamo we heard footsteps on the stairs leading up to the front porch, and then a voice, a refined, middle-aged female voice, called out, “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an interloping girlfriend.”

“Do I call your mom Priscilla or Mrs. Blackwell?” I whispered. Charlie was walking out onto the porch with me behind him, and he said, “Hey, Maj, Alice wants to know if she should call you Priscilla or Mrs. Blackwell.”

“Charlie,” I hissed.

His mother laughed. “It depends,” she said. “We’ll have to see how much I like Alice.”

She had chin-length white hair that was slicked back on her head, its wetness holding it in place in that way it does for only a few minutes after you emerge from water. She wore a navy-blue tank swimsuit and a watch and nothing else, not even shoes or a towel. She was nearly six feet, and her legs and chest and shoulders were all both wrinkly and tan; her body was slim and athletic. (“I was field-hockey captain at Dana Hall as well as Holyoke,” she mentioned later in the weekend, and I murmured my approval not because I actually was impressed but because I could tell I should be.)

She had not yet glanced in my direction, and she reached out and set her fingers under Charlie’s chin—I observed the strange fact of Charlie and his mother not embracing—and after her eyes had roamed over his face, she said in a warm tone, “That haircut makes you look like a Jew.”

Without hesitation—sincerely, it seemed—Charlie laughed. “Hey, at least I still have hair, which is more than I can say for your oldest son.”

But she had already moved on; with no embarrassment or apology, she was looking me up and down. “What a little dish you are.”

I stepped forward and extended the terra-cotta vase with the basil plant in it. “Thank you very much for having me.”

Mrs. Blackwell turned to Charlie. “I’ll bet you wish it were marijuana,” she said, and there was a note of pride in her voice, which thickened as she added, addressing me, “My sons are incorrigibly naughty, except for Eddie, who’s straight as a ruler. I’m putting you in Itty-Bitty. Chas, help her settle in.” She turned back to me. “Halcyon can be a bit rustic, but I’m sure you don’t mind roughing it. Are you a singles or a doubles girl?”

It took me a few seconds to figure out what she was referring to. “Oh, I don’t play tennis.” I smiled ruefully. “Charlie told me about the tournament, though, and it sounds like a fun tradition.”

“If you don’t play tennis, what on earth do you do?” She was feigning confusion when I’m sure she wasn’t confused at all. Shrewdness emanated from her. She looked at her watch. “Drinks will be at 6 sharp, and we’ll leave for the clubhouse at 7:20.” She was looking at me again when she added, “You’ll want to change for dinner.”

As I climbed the steps leading to the screened porch of the Alamo at a minute to six, I saw that the porch was empty. Naturally, I wondered if I’d gotten the time or place wrong that we were to have drinks, and my apprehension increased when I looked over my shoulder and saw Charlie’s brother John walking up the grassy incline from the lake, wearing plaid swim trunks, and holding the hand of Margaret, who was his seven-year-old daughter. As he approached, he made a wincing smile. “We’ll do a very quick turnaround,” he said to me. “Lightning speed, right, Margaret? Alice, you look lovely.” A threadbare white towel hung around John’s neck, and both he and Margaret had burnt noses and shoulders.

I’d met John, and several other Blackwells, on the dock that afternoon. Everyone was friendly—the children were busy splashing and playing—and I had trouble remembering who was who except for Charlie’s father, Harold Blackwell, who when we arrived was climbing a wooden ladder out of the water. He looked like an older version of the Wisconsin governor I had paid only passing attention to in the newspaper and on television when I was in high school and college, except that instead of wearing a business suit, he wore swim trunks, his gray chest hair clung wetly to his skin, and his nipples were mauve coins; to see the nipples of the former governor was an unsettling experience on which I did my best not to dwell.

I had just opened the screen door onto the porch of the Alamo when a thin, black woman in a black dress and a white apron appeared from inside the house, carrying a tray of highball glasses, which she set on a large round table. Already there sat on the white tablecloth bottles of wine, whiskey, brandy, sweet vermouth, and bitters, a silver ice bucket, a lemon, a dish of maraschino cherries, green cocktail napkins, and many more glasses—wineglasses and old-fashioneds—off which the evening sun reflected enchantingly. A large cooler filled with ice and cans of Pabst and Schlitz waited adjacent to the table with the lid removed.

Within the next half hour, they all appeared, either from inside the Alamo or traipsing over from the other cottages, many of them wet-haired, the men in seersucker suits or khaki pants and navy blazers, the women in sundresses, holding the hands of children—little girls in green or pink dresses with smocking across the chest, or hand-stitched balloons or apples, wearing Mary Janes on their feet; little boys in shortalls and white socks that folded down and white saddle shoes.

Drinks were distributed—most of the adults had old-fashioneds while the children had Shirley Temples or Roy Rogers—and I met the family members I hadn’t met before. It quickly became clear that there was no conversation in which I was required, really, to do much more than nod and laugh. “We’re all so curious about you,” said Nan, the wife of Charlie’s brother John, and then she proceeded not to ask me any questions as she and John and Charlie and I stood there for 10 minutes.

Soon the sound of tinkling glass silenced the porch. “If you’ll permit a doddering old man to say a few words,” Harold Blackwell said, and there were hoots and whoops of support; Arthur brought his fingers to his mouth and whistled. Charlie took my hand and whispered, “Everything O.K.?” I nodded.

“What a tremendous pleasure for Priscilla and me to have you all here.” Harold Blackwell looked around the porch. “And how blessed we are as a family.” Although I was still prepared for his words to sound at least a little fake and canned, I was struck by how kind and genuine he seemed. “Looking at the group assembled here, I can’t tell you how proud it makes me,” he said, and I thought he might cry. Instead, smiling, he said, “We’re so very pleased to meet Alice. A special welcome to you, my dear.”

“Hear, hear,” Charlie said and rattled the ice in his cup—he’d been drinking whiskey.

“I hope some day all of you will have the opportunity to look out at three generations and feel the love and pride that are in my heart tonight. May God forever bless and protect the Blackwell family, and may the light of His spirit shine through all of us.” Here, Harold held up his glass, and everyone voiced their assent; a few people said amen. Conversations had just begun to resume when Arthur loudly cleared his throat, then actually climbed atop a chair. “This seems as good a time as any,” he said. “When I heard Chasbo was bringing home a new girl, I wanted to do something in her honor. So I wrote a poem—” At this, the porch erupted into raucous cheers, including from Charlie. Arthur pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket, looked at it, then refolded it. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got it memorized.”

He looked directly at me and smiled.

*“Nymphomaniacal Alice

Used a dynamite stick as a phallus

They found her vagina

in North Carolina

And bits of her tits down in Dallas.”*

In the ensuing silence, I could hear the lilt of the tiny waves hitting the shore below us, and one of the little boys in the grass out front said, “But it’s mine.” And then on the porch there was a delighted sort of roaring and I quickly realized, though I had trouble believing it, that the roar came from Mrs. Blackwell. Soon everyone else joined in, guffawing and applauding. I was so shocked that I could have cried—they’d have been tears of astonishment, not of sadness or hurt—but I knew that it was very important not to. I kept my head up, smiling in a glazed kind of way. I did not look at Charlie because I was afraid what I’d see would be a gleeful expression. I wondered, had the children heard?

“Far be it from me to offer praise to one of my younger brothers,” Ed said, “but that was masterful.” (And here Ed was supposed to be the nice, refined one.)

Uncle Trip nudged me. “It’s not every day you get a poem written in your honor, is it?”

I gave a spluttery fake laugh that was the best I could manage.

Charlie and I were still standing side by side, we were not looking at each other, but I was pretty sure he was grinning while speaking through clenched teeth when he said, “You’re horrified, right?”

“Arthur didn’t write that.” I was barely moving my lips, either. “I first heard it from a boy named Roy Ziemniak in 1956.”

We walked to the clubhouse for dinner in a sloppy sort of caravan. Inside the dining room, long tables extended north, south, east, and west from the center of the room—they were like a tremendous cross—and the tables were not divided by family, as I’d have imagined (I later realized they couldn’t have been, because there were four tables and five Halcyon families), but rather by the clucking, seemingly arbitrary instructions of the matriarchs. Mrs. Blackwell directed the grandchildren toward one table, her older sons and their wives to scattered points, and then she turned her attention to Charlie and me. “Chas, go sit by Mrs. deWolfe because she’s dying to hear your theory about Jimmy Connors. Alice, you’re right here.” She pointed to the second-to-last place at one table. “I find it so tiresome when couples are seated side by side, don’t you?” I nodded, unable to remember the last place I’d been that had featured assigned seating.

When we’d all taken our seats—the men waited for the women, I observed, and the women first seated their children—the man next to me, who was wearing green pants with little navy turtles embroidered on them, extended his hand. “Rumpus Higginson,” he said.

“Alice Lindgren.” As we shook hands, I felt slightly proud of myself for not laughing, not even smiling or letting my lips twitch. We had a first course of vichyssoise served in shallow white bowls with a sprinkling of chives. Over the soup, Rumpus, or Mr. Higginson—really, I had little idea how I was supposed to address anyone—asked, “Have you spent much time in Door County, Allison?”

I did not correct him. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t made it here before, but it certainly lives up to its reputation.”

On being assigned this seat, I had wondered if Mrs. Blackwell might be exiling me, but she had sat across the table and one over (to keep an eye on me? But, no, I was being silly) and she said then, “Rump, tell me it isn’t true about Cecily and Gordon. If they move to Los Angeles, we have no hope of seeing them again.”

The conversation proceeded in much this way as we moved on to the main course of broiled chicken. During the whole of dinner, I nodded at what seemed to be the appropriate intervals, I smiled when they smiled and laughed when they laughed, I even answered a question about my own taste in music—“Allison, do you prefer the classical or romantic era?” Rumpus inquired, and I said, “I’ve always enjoyed Mahler’s Fifth”—and at the same time I became first tipsy and then solidly drunk in a way I had never been in my entire life. The waiters and waitresses, most of whom appeared to be about 14 years old, refilled our wine glasses frequently, and I rose to use the bathroom a second time just as coffee was being served. The walls shifted as I left the room.

There was a sitting room just outside the dining room, and both its walls and those in the halls leading to the bathroom were densely covered with photos, the majority of them black and white: Halcyon inhabitants holding fish or playing tennis (the latter activity featured both action shots and posed ones, with the players crossing their rackets in front of their bodies). On my return from the bathroom, I was studying a photo of Mrs. Blackwell when a woman appeared from nowhere and threw herself into my arms. “I am so excited to meet you!” she cried.

Even when she’d extracted herself from our non-mutual embrace, she held tightly to my upper arms, looking at me with great enthusiasm. She had white-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, big front teeth, and tan skin; she was pretty, but in this moment she was also far too physically close. “And I heard about that raunchy poem Arthur wrote about you, and I am mortified. I was with the baby in Gin Rummy, but if I had been there, I would never have let him do that. You must think that we’re the most disgraceful family in the entire world.”

Then her eyes widened, and I do not exaggerate when I say that she proceeded to shriek. “Oh, you don’t even know who I am! Oh my stars!” She began to laugh, bringing a hand to her chest. “I’m Jadey! Arthur’s wife! I’m Jadey Blackwell! Oh, Alice, you have to forgive my terrible manners!”

“What a pleasure to meet you.” I could hear the expansiveness in my voice, a decidedly unfamiliar tone. “But your husband forgot there’s an alternate ending for the limerick.” Both the words alternate and limerick had been daunting to pronounce, and I was proud that I had surmounted them. “It can also go: And her anus in Buckingham Palace.”

Jadey peered at me more closely, then whispered. “Oh my Lord, are you drunk?” I shook my head, but she was saying, “Oh, I would be, too! Oh, you must be just beside yourself! I can only imagine what this weekend is like for you. They tease you so much, don’t they? My first year of marriage, I was on the brink of tears the whole time, and I had grown up with the Blackwells! Stay right here,” she said. “I’m getting Charlie. You poor baby, you’re drunk as a skunk.”

Because I was indeed drunk, I didn’t mind just standing there, doing nothing; I gazed up at the silver trophy vase sitting on the mantel above the fireplace—it was about a foot tall—and by the time Charlie emerged from the dining room a minute later, Jadey just behind him, I was holding the trophy in my arms, squinting down at it.

“Let’s put that back where it belongs, sticky fingers,” Charlie said as he eased the trophy from my hands and returned it to the mantel. He said to Jadey, “Tell Maj you think Alice has whatever the baby is sick with.”

Jadey made a face. “Colic, Chas?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Make something up. I’m taking her back to Itty-Bitty.”

Jadey approached me, setting her hands on the slopes where my shoulders became my neck; the effect of her standing like this was halfway between a babushka pinching your cheeks and a lover moving in for a kiss. “Alice, we are going to be best friends.”

“You seem like a very special person,” I said, and Charlie burst into laughter. To Jadey, he said, “She’s never like this. Seriously, I’ve never seen this before.”

“She’s adorable,” Jadey said, and she held the clubhouse door for us as we stepped outside. “Don’t let her fall, Chas.”

The slate sidewalk was lit only by the stars and the half-moon, and the distance we had to go seemed significantly greater than it had on the way there.

Charlie had one arm across my back and the other hand holding my elbow. “Steady there, party girl,” he said. “Was Rump Higginson that unbearable a dinner companion?”

We were passing the family compound closest to the clubhouse—this one, I’d learned a few hours before, belonged to the Thayers—and I said, “Everyone here is so rich.”

Charlie laughed but not all that heartily. After a beat, he asked, “You like that?”

“Rich people are bizarre!” I exclaimed. (This, of course, was a remark Charlie quoted back to me many times in the years to come.) “I love you, Charlie, but all this fuss about tennis and Princeton and the Biltmore Hotel—if you were the foreman at Fassbinder’s, sometimes I think that would be easier.”

At breakfast in the clubhouse the next morning, Arthur said to me from across the table, “Alice, the word of the day is legs. Please spread the word.” Jadey, who was sitting next to him holding the baby, slapped Arthur playfully and said, “She hasn’t even had her coffee yet.” Jadey made no mention of our interaction the night before, for which I was grateful, though I did detect in her expression a discreet merriment.

Breakfast, I discovered, was a more haphazard affair than dinner, with people appearing and departing at various times, and if you wanted toast or an English muffin or cold cereal, you fixed it yourself from the buffet; only if you wanted eggs or bacon or waffles did you order from the waiter, a pale and skinny teenage boy with an enormous Adam’s apple.

When I’d arrived at Halcyon the previous afternoon, I had felt a fear that the weekend would pass slowly, but the opposite proved true. While I did have a splitting headache at breakfast, the pain had dulled by late morning. I spent most of the day sitting on a blanket on the sidelines of the tennis courts, observing the matches, either watching Charlie play or sitting next to him when he wasn’t playing. He’d work up a vigorous sweat during his sets, then fill a cup of water from the large thermos by the net, pour it over his head, and shake his head like a dog. That morning, when he’d come to Itty-Bitty to find me for breakfast, I’d been awake and dressed, waiting for him, and as he’d entered through the screen door, he’d called, “Where’s my favorite lush?”

At the tennis courts, after beating Emily Higginson 7–3, 6–4, Mrs. Blackwell said to me, “I take it a good night’s sleep was just what the doctor ordered.” I was almost certain that she knew I’d had too much to drink, but all I did was murmur my assent.

I had brought a novel to the tennis courts with me—it was Pale Fire, which I’d purchased after Nabokov’s death, earlier in the summer—but because of the sun and the conversation, I didn’t end up reading a word. Really, over that day and the next there were so many conversations and activities and meals, so many changes of clothes, into a swimsuit and out and back in when the suit wasn’t quite dry, back into the water (it was the ideal temperature, cool enough to be refreshing but not chilly the way Lake Michigan often can be), and then we rode the motorboat to the town a few miles over for ice cream, then back to Halcyon, back into a skirt, up to dinner, and suddenly I realized I’d acquired a new tan on my face and arms. On Sunday morning, an Episcopal priest, Reverend Ayrault, arrived at 10 to hold a service for the Blackwell family on the porch of the Alamo, complete with communion; apparently, he had driven from Green Bay solely for this purpose, and afterward he sat beside Mrs. Blackwell at lunch in the clubhouse. “That’s nice of him to come all the way up here,” I remarked to Charlie, who replied, “Republicans give the good reverend a hard-on.”

The winners of the Halcyon Open were awarded their trophies on Sunday afternoon, small cheap gold figures perched on wooden bases. As we walked back from the tennis courts to the Alamo—a distance of about half a mile—I thought of leaving the next day and felt a flicker of pre-emptive nostalgia. I was just settling into Halcyon’s rhythms.

We were nearing the Alamo when Jadey caught up with us and set her hand on my forearm. “Come wash your hair with me in the lake. I’ve got 20 minutes before the baby wakes up and all holy hell breaks loose.” She jogged toward Gin Rummy, the cottage she and Arthur and their children were staying in, and I glanced quizzically at Charlie.

“You heard her,” he said. “Shake a leg.”

“She washes her hair in the lake?”

“It’s to avoid waiting in line for the bathroom.”

In fact, the impression I got a few minutes later as Jadey and I stood in the water near the dock, her plastic shampoo bottle set on the top step of the wooden ladder, was that she washed her hair in the lake mostly because she thought washing her hair in the lake was fun. She held her hands up to her head, massaging, until her scalp was covered in white lather. “I’ve been meaning to say, that’s the cutest swimsuit,” she added. “Is it from Marshall Field’s?”

“It’s from a store in Madison owned by a friend of mine.” Jadey’s swimsuit was a Lilly bikini, and mine was red with white stripes.

“How’s Maj treating you? She can be rough, right?”

I raised one finger to indicate a pause, then held my nose as I sank under water. When I broke the surface, Jadey said, “She wanted a girl, is what they say, but she just kept having boys. That’s the theory anyway, why she doesn’t like girls—because she feels rejected by them. Do I sound like Sigmund Freud?” She was smiling in a self-deprecating way, and I wondered whether she had picked up the Blackwells’ habit of alternate teasing and self-mockery or whether she’d had the habit all along. “Don’t be afraid of Maj is my point,” Jadey said. “Her bark is worse than her bite.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of her.” I really wasn’t. Here in Halcyon I was on her turf, but the more general notion I kept returning to was that there was something Mrs. Blackwell could bestow, some sort of approval, that did not, fundamentally, matter to me. All I wanted was adequately pleasant relations. I didn’t need to be close to Mrs. Blackwell, didn’t need to be one of her favorites.

“You’re lucky that you’re 30,” Jadey said. “I was 21 when I married Arthur, and I was so easily intimidated. If Maj said boo to me, I’d be crying in the corner. Plus, Arthur used to—” At this point, unmistakably, we heard a baby’s wail. Jadey rolled her eyes. “Never have children,” she said, but already, she was swimming toward the ladder.

“Jadey,” I said, and she looked over her shoulder. “Thank you for being so nice about Friday night.”

On Sunday evening, during the cocktail hour (if there was a day of the week the Blackwells abstained from drinking, I never saw it), I found myself for the first time talking one-on-one to Charlie’s brother Ed. Though I had been in the same general space as him several times in the past few days, I had hardly spoken to him directly. I had felt aware of not wanting to seek him out just because he was the congressman—not that I secretly did want to seek him out, but I most certainly didn’t want to seem like I was. But he was the one who approached me on the porch, saying, “I hope you haven’t found us overwhelming.” (Of course, they took pride in their overwhelmingness, as all families that are both large and happy do.)

Charlie materialized beside us. “Eddie, you in for poker at 10? Gil deWolfe just called.” Charlie looked at me and said, “You don’t mind if I head over to the deWolfes’ for a couple hours after dinner, do you?”

I shook my head. “I need to pack anyway.”

Ed had turned away momentarily, summoned to settle a dispute between two of his sons, and Charlie said to me, “Eager to make your escape?”

“I like your family, Charlie,” I said. “They’ve been really hospitable this weekend—well, besides the limerick, but I’ve gotten over that.”

“You know what? I like you. And I think you look very pretty right now.” Charlie leaned in and kissed me on the lips. It was just a quick peck, but right away I heard someone cry out, “Look at the lovebirds!” Then John, who was nearby, said, “Good Christ, can you two not keep your hands off each other?”

I stepped back, though we truly hadn’t been touching at all inappropriately. The porch grew quiet, and from the other end of it, Uncle Trip called, “Chasbo, now that Alice has seen the kind of stock you come from, think she’ll stick around?”

“Hope so,” Charlie said, and—I could feel the Blackwells’ eyes on me—I smiled stiffly. Do not cower. These weren’t the words Jadey had used, but that had been the message.

Then John said, “Alice, if you’re not careful, it looks to me like Chas here might pop the question.”

There was a silence, a short one, and before someone could fill it with an off-color joke, I said, “Actually—” My voice was hoarse, and I cleared my throat in as genteel a way as I could manage. “Actually, Charlie has already asked me to marry him, and I’ve accepted.”

I might have imagined this part, but I think I heard a gasp—a woman’s gasp, which I’m pretty sure was Nan’s. Charlie set his hand on the small of my back, and then Harold, who was standing by the hammock, said, “Golly, that’s tremendous. That’s just super news. We couldn’t be happier for both of you.” Soon all the Blackwells were talking at once: “No shit?” Arthur was saying, and he and John were manfully hugging Charlie, and Ed returned to kiss my cheek and Arthur gave me a noogie, literally, and cried, “Welcome to the fam-damily, Al!” Harold leaned around Charlie to pat my hand, then Jadey enveloped me, shouting, “I knew it! I knew it! I told you we’d be best friends, and now it’s even better because we’ll be sisters!”

I disentangled myself from Jadey’s arms when I saw Mrs. Blackwell approaching; I smoothed my hair. The rest of them—they faded around me. That I was not afraid of Mrs. Blackwell was more or less true, at least in the abstract. But it was also true that when she turned her attention to me, I always felt, and not in a positive way, as if we were the only ones in the room and total vigilance were required.

She did not hug or kiss me, she didn’t touch me at all. She seemed both amused and dubious as she looked at me for a long moment before speaking. Finally, she said, “What a clever girl you are.”